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Anita Baker returns with a bang.
by Lynn Norment, Sept. 1, 1994
Ebony
Though Anita Baker has been off he music scene for three years, she hasn't missed a beat. Still vibrant and sassy, the feisty diva is set to re-emerge into the glitter and glamor of the public limelight, and she's doing so with as big a bang as ever.
Her new album, Rhythm Of Love, is due out this month, and the first single, "Body & Soul," is already thrilling her legions of supporters. Though she is as passionate a performer as ever, the Anita Baker her fans will see when she starts touring is not quite the same Anita Baker they saw before her hiatus from the stage. She's now a mommy packing a double whammy.
In January 1993, her first child, Walter Baker Bridgforth, was born. And just last May, little Edward Carlton Bridgforth came into the world, weighing in at 7 pounds, 13 ounces, after Baker was in labor for six days. It was a special blessing for Baker and her husband, Detroit real estate developer Walter Bridgforth, for she had suffered two miscarriages before becoming pregnant with Little Walter. She blamed a much publicized miscarriage in 1989 on her nonstop touring, but then miscarried again in October 1991. When she became pregnant the third and fourth times, she had a surgical procedure that enabled her to deliver two healthy boys.
Ironically, Little Eddie came as a surprise after Baker had immersed herself into recording her fifth album and embarked on a diligent exercise program to prepare herself for the rigors of touring. She did not discover that she was pregnant until the ninth week, when a home pregnancy test explained the stubborn six pounds that just wouldn't go away no matter how much she jogged and bicycled up and down the lakefront near her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., outside Detroit.
Now the sultry, soulful singer who has sold 15 million albums and earned seven Grammy Awards has found the joy and fulfillment of motherhood. And she's happy, even ecstatic, tempered with the personal contentment that comes with a successful career, a "wonderful, supportive" husband and two beautiful, healthy children.
Relaxing at her new, two-storied, 15-room home, she talks freely about how comfortable she has become being a homebody; about how she enjoys going all day without putting on a pair of shoes or makeup; how thrilled she was when just a week earlier Little Walter started calling her "mommy"; how there are "parts of motherhood I wasn't ready for, like circumcision"; and how she wishes she had had her children earlier.
"I've been pregnant for three years in a row," she points out, comfortably dressed in knit shorts and an oversized cotton shirt. But in between delivering two sons, she moved into a new home on the site of the historic Dodge mansion (that's Dodge of automobile industry fame). She supervised the decorating, which includes numerous architectural antiques, such a winding marble staircase and several French marble fireplaces, while at the same time writing and producing songs. By the time Little Eddie was born, Baker had completed the new album.
Though she has been executive producer for previous albums, Rhythm Of Love is the first time Baker has not worked with producer Michael Powell. "It's like driving a car by myself for the first time," she says. Produced with a $2. million budget, the new album takes Baker out of the pack of female artists who are producer-dependent.
Baker continues to seduce listeners with the sultry contralto that propelled her to stardom with the albums Songstress, Compositions, Rapture and Giving You The Best That I Got. With her unique vocal style that combines jazz, gospel and blues, she is a natural favorite of romantics, but is also well-loved by those who have an appreciation for old-fashioned song styling devoid of high-tech gimmickry.
She tells how when she takes the babies to the doctor, she gets support from other mothers she encounters. "Women tell me all the time: |You go ahead and do your thing, girl. We'll be waiting,'" Baker says. "It doesn't have to be like this," she adds, expressing gratitude for the loyalty of her fans. "This is the music business. You go away for six months and people say, |Anita who?' I really want to just thank everybody. I can't wait to get back on stage."
By the end of the year, Baker will launch a six-month concert tour. "I wish I could just put on a pair of jeans and a shirt and come out and sing this time, because, again, I've found out what's important. The music is what's important. The get-up and costumes are not, the staging is not ... I'm not a fashion model; I'm a singer, that's all I want to do."
But Baker acknowledges that she has a "responsibility to my fans" and she has to give them a part of her that they want to see. "But I tell you, if it was up to me, there would be two spotlights, the rhythm section and me in a cotton shirt and some jeans. And we'd just whip it! ... I just have to find a happy medium. But, like I tell my publicists and my managers, its never going to be the same as if was before: I've got two kids."
And those two children keep their doting mother quite busy, even though she has the help of two nannies and numerous family members. This support system mill make it possible for Baker to tour with the comfort of knowing that her sons mill be lovingly cared for in her absence. But already she's planning to have the children travel with her periodically while she's on the road.
She laughs now as she recalls how, when the baby was just a few weeks old, she gladly accepted Aretha Franklin's invitation to attend her concert at the White House and a party at the Ritz afterwards. "I was all ready to go and the night before, I said, |I can't leave my baby; I can't go anywhere,'" Baker recalls. "After being pregnant for three years in a row, you want to go to a party. But I just couldn't leave my baby."
Since then, she has ventured away from home, first to Boston last summer to perform at the Boston Pops concert, and then several times to Los Angeles and elsewhere to prepare for the launching of her album.
When fans hear the single, "Rhythm Of Love," she says they might be surprised by the dialogue ("It's not rap, it doesn't rhyme"). But she felt it appropriate for the song, which was inspired by a real-life experience. "Basically it talks about how, if you're on a roller coaster or merry-go-round, you just keep going around and around until everything just gets blurry and you can't see what's important anymore. Sometimes when you are on that merry-go-round, you lose your rhythm and you need to just stop the ride and get off and find your rhythm."
She says that is what happened during her last tour. She tells how she walked into the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Chicago and just started crying uncontrollably. Consequently, she ended up canceling "half a million dollars" worth of concert dates despite the booming ticket sales, because she felt it was time to go home. "I had lost my rhythm," she says. "I was just on the road and there was nothing else going on in my life. My house revolved around that, my family revolved around that, my leisure time revolved around that, my everything, and that wasn't good. I wanted to focus on having a family. That's what was wrong. So we've got our rhythm going again."
But since Baker's last tour, the music industry has changed dramatically. Rap and hip-hop have become a dominating force, and newcomer Toni Braxton has emerged with a sultry alto that is often compared to Baker, smoldering voice. But Baker does not feel threatened by Braxton. "I love her music. I'm a Babyface fan; he and LA do incredible songs," she says.
In fact, Braxton's debut hit, "Love Shoulda Brought You Home" from the Boomerang movie soundtrack, was written for Baker. "Being pregnant [with her second child], there was no way I could perform to the best of my abilities," she explains. "So I stepped aside. There is room for everybody. This is a big, wide, wonderful world and the recording industry is a multibillion dollar business. There is room for everybody to make records and make money and be happy. I would have loved to sing that song, but it just wasn't in the cards."
Nor is jealousy.
"I'm too busy to be jealous of Toni Braxton," she says. "I am who I am and I'm confident with that. When I first came out, people said I sounded like Sarah Vaughan. Its a horrible thing [to be compared with an established artist]. Its nice in the sense that I love Sarah Vaughan, but I wanted to be known for what I brought to the table.
"It's hard enough for a young artist coming into this business without hearing that Toni Braxton sounds like Anita Baker, or Anita Baker sounds like Sarah Vaughan. It's tough. The way Toni sings, God gave that gift to her."
Baker adds that she and her husband met Toni Braxton at a party after Whitney Houston's concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York, and that they talked about how disc jockeys were asking Braxton about how she came to record a song intended for Anita Baker. "I told her to tell them what happened. So then she started talking about it. Again, its a big business and there's room for everybody."
But in Anita Baker's heart of hearts, there's room for only one: Walter Bridgforth. The couple married five years ago, two years after they met in a Detroit mall where she was shopping for shoes. "I was very career-oriented until I fell in love, fell deep, deep in the caverns of love with Walter, and then I started having the desire to have children.
"Sometimes we'll be lying on the floor with the kids, saying, |We've got kids, we've been married for damn near 10 years!' And the thing we marvel at is that we don't feel married. The honeymoon is still going on."
And candlelight dinners help maintain the romantic mood. Throughout the roomy, tastefully decorated home are candles and candlesticks of all colors, sizes and shapes. Baker confesses that they are there for more than just decoration. "After we put the kids to bed, we go out on the patio overlooking the lake, and its just a lot of little twinkling, like Christmas lights out there. Sometimes we don't even eat dinner. We just go out there, light the candles and just sit. When the candlelight goes on, we know its time to cool out. It's not hard to keep the romance in our marriage because he's a super man."
Baker explains that another secret to their happiness is that "we don't hassle each other." She adds: "I've been very careful to allow him to have his own life, apart from me, and I don't get into his business. If he wants advice, I'll wait for him to ask. If he wants to talk, I try to listen ten to him instead of telling him, |Well, if it were my business....' The only thing I win do in terms of involving myself is tell him when its 5 o,clock. If he continues working, then I know he needs to.
"As a real estate developer, he's very successful, and I'm really proud of him," she continues. "I just try to let him have his space and he definitely lets me have mine. So when we come together, its exciting. I have stuff to talk to him about, he's got stuff to talk to me about and we definitely have the kids in common. We give each other room to have a life outside of each other."
Well, Baker's other life is talking her away from the candlelight and back into the spotlight. She says she's excited about getting back on stage and performing. "But its going to be a little different," she says. "On stage I know I'm going to be as intense as ever because I still have passion for my music. And I need to see my audience. There's a part of me that needs that. But I just hope that when people come out to a show and they see things are a little more relaxed and less staged, that they will understand that it is something that I need."
No doubt her fans mill understand that need, for Anita Baker, with her earthy soulfulness and sultry vocals, is just what they need.